When a farmer discovered biotech wheat on a remote field in eastern Oregon in April, he found the agricultural equivalent of a needle in a haystack — a few stalks amid more than half a billion acres of wheat planted and harvested in the last dozen years.

The detection made headlines around the world, not merely because the needle was hard to find, but because it wasn’t supposed to exist at all: Genetically modified wheat was developed, tested, and proven safe for human consumption but it was not commercialized.

The last approved field-test planting of GM wheat in Oregon was in 2001, according to the Department of Agriculture. The most recent field test anywhere in the United States was in 2005. Since then, American farmers have grown more than 500 million acres of wheat. That’s an area larger than the state of Alaska.

Amid this enormous bounty of crops, someone spotted a small handful of plants that shouldn’t have sprouted from Oregon’s soil.

As a North Dakota wheat producer, the first thing I want you to know is that GM wheat doesn’t put anyone at risk. “The detection of this wheat variety does not pose a safety concern,” said the USDA in a statement.

The technology in question — herbicide resistance that helps crops fight weeds — is well understood and commonly used in corn and soybeans. We eat safe and nutritious food derived from it every day. This trait was not commercialized in wheat for the simple economic worry that foreign buyers would refuse it because they have not yet embraced farming’s biotech revolution.

So the biggest question over the GM wheat in Oregon is not whether it’s safe — we know with confidence it is — but rather how it got there in the first place. Authorities must launch a thorough investigation that examines every possibility, from the misplacement of seeds during field tests years ago to the survival of a few stray plants in the wild.

And let’s not discount the possibility of mischief: The enemies of biotechnology are thrilled by this discovery because they think it gives modern agriculture a black eye.

Meanwhile, let’s learn two lessons from this episode.

The first is we have an outstanding system of food regulation in the United States. It’s so good it can spot an isolated event in an Oregon wheat field and help us begin the process of understanding what happened.